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Comment by purplelobster | Hacker News Reader

My guess is automated trading, looking for announcements like "Tesla introduces X". April 1st really should be hard coded as an exception in these algorithms, until they can take a joke that is.

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It looks like Bloomberg offers this as a service to their subscribers (hence the *ignore in their version of the press release). Either some traders are cheaping out in their news inputs or didn't read the documentation.

Yeah, it looks as though Tesla did their part to alert traders / algorithms that this was something to be ignored. If they've handrolled site scrapers to pull in their news then they've only themselves to blame.

But then again, Gmail was launched on April 1st.

This raises an interesting question - did Google intend to trick not only consumers, but also shareholders? As the article indicates, announcing a product triggers a kneejerk reaction in the market, which might be something Google would want to avoid on such a risky project.

It's worse than that though. Most of the algos see the PR, and then look for arbitrage opportunities created by it, but also use the stock price fluctuations as a signal for sentiment. All you need is one algo to stupidly misjudge sentiment and you create a thundering herd.

I'd recommend "if the date is close to April 1, anything radical needs to be passed in front of a human analyst before it's allowed to affect the calculations" as a solution to these situations.

That could turn April 1 into the yearly "serious announcement time" because companies would know a human will spend time really thinking about valuations rather than automated systems. :)

Problem f'ing solved.

Relevant. https://xkcd.com/810/

Yeah, that's the author's guess as well.

> And when I say "people" I mean mostly "algorithms," which are faster and more literal than humans.

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